Categories
Phones

Ex-phones 2017 update

Phones I have had previously (3 more added meanwhile since 2014):

(could be that 1 to 3 phones are missing, but are considered to not important since don’t change the overall picture, ericsson -> siemens -> windows mobile -> android (HTC then Samsung) )

Categories
Uncategorized

My first gaming rig

I saw Linus showing his first gaming rig
and heck he is young (or more likely I am old) 🙂
since the only source of information I could get the specs from, was internet museums 😀

special thanks to my dad who brought this puppy home, without that I would most likely not get into computers and IT at all
the system looked approximately like this, except there was no 3.5″ floppy drive and the monitor was as shown to the right

hp-d1326ahp-d1181a

D1326A HEWLETT-PACKARD-VECTRA

  • released 1987, retired 1990
  • 12 MHz Intel 80286 CPU
  • came standard with 640KB RAM (who would ever need more, right?)
  • 5.25 inch floppy, 20 MB hard disc, VGA card
  • no mouse

HP D1181A Monochrome Video Graphics Display (14″) (points below from original advertising)

  • plug-compatible with the industry-standard VGA
  • designed for use with the HP Video Graphics Adapter (D1180A)
  • choice of screen colors, including amber, green and soft-white
  • resolutions varying from 320 x 200 to 640 x 480 and can display up to 64 shades of gray
  • ideal for text, graphics and image applications

and hold on for the release price, it was apparently 3595 USD… beat that.
mighty MS DOS operating system, blue screens like Norton or Volkov commander, MS Basic
those were times…

  • one of the first things I did after getting it was to format the hard disk drive by accident
  •     (attempt to clean the disk for more space)
  • and on reboot infamous “no system disk or disk error” 🙂
  • weeks spent not knowing how to revive it, thanks goes to Gatis working in Fortek for giving me a boot floppy
  •     also for introducing me to Fidonet, Sound Blaster and archive of games out of my imagination
  • (he had a system to read/write from VHS tapes, which could store like 2GB of information)
  • (which was freaking incredible for those times)
  • months spent booting from a floppy not knowing how to make the HDD bootable and what autoexec.bat is for
  •     (thanks to this I learned a lot about DOS commands)
  • after, killed the 20MB drive once by dropping it from not very high.
  • again, months booting from a floppy
  • and revived it by dropping it again also accidentally
  • bringing home windows 3.1 (including the swap file :D) on some 40 5″ floppies (thank you Edgar)
  • since there was no installation available
  • unforgettable game titles like
  •     * prince of persia
  •     * diggers
  •     * paratrooper
  • * the incredible machine
  • fighting to free ram by memory managers to run the games 🙂
Categories
General Latviešu

20071216 – Prāta Banka – Ģirts Niedra edition

Tālajā 2007 piedalījos spēlē, garlaicīga nebija. Lielais paldies Ilonai Gasonei citādi būtu pamatīgi izgāzies 🙂
20071216 – Prāta Banka – Ģirts Niedra edition

Categories
Latviešu

Latvian and Lithuanian languages in the language tree

196_1938427388

Categories
General

Sci-fi top 100 movies list

Took me a half year or so, but finally got through the list, highly recommended for anyone interested in sci-fi movies
The 100 Best Sci-Fi Movies of All Time

Categories
Funny General IT

My birthday song #1 – Champaign – How ‘Bout Us

http://geboortedaghit.nl/ddmmyyyy
Interesting concept, you fill in your birthdate, replace ddmmyyyy with your birtdate e.g. http://geboortedaghit.nl/01071978 for July 1st 1978.
What you get as a result is #1 song at that time in charts (not sure which).
This is what I got (never heard it before to be honest). Note the number 22 appear in second 29 🙂
Champaign – How ‘Bout Us

Categories
Funny General

Thanks all – 100000th birthday

For the best wishes, it is after all a nice round birthday, 100000.
Hope I make it to 1000000, hell maybe even the next one 😀
Nerd out.

Categories
IT Semantics

EU Open Data Portal

Good to see something you have invested your time in come alive.
http://open-data.europa.eu/

Categories
IT

RoboForm -> 1password

I am leaving RoboForm for 1password
The RoboForm guys can blame no support for Android in offline mode 🙂
I gave them one month to fix it, so my conscience is fine

Categories
IT

Using Linux command line arguments containing spaces in a variable

Last days had some trouble with space characters used in file names and the consequences of passing parameters using those file names to Linux programs.
Consider the following example:
test1.sh:
cmdline="-DMyTest=\"1 2 3\" -some \"./Arguments.test\" -testpath=\"/my test\" \"my test\""
echo ----------------------------------------------
./test2.sh $cmdline
echo ----------------------------------------------
./test2.sh -DMyTest="1 2 3" -some "./Arguments.test" -testpath="/my test" "my test"

test2.sh:
echo Using '"$@"';
for p in "$@";
do
echo "[$p]";
done

Calling test1.sh, the result is:
----------------------------------------------
Using "$@"
[-DMyTest="1]
[2]
[3"]
[-some]
["./Arguments.test"]
[-testpath="/my]
[test"]
["my]
[test"]
----------------------------------------------
Using "$@"
[-DMyTest=1 2 3]
[-some]
[./Arguments.test]
[-testpath=/my test]
[my test]

– where the first part is an issue as it does not read my arguments as expected.
The solution was very simple, in the first call use
eval ./test2.sh $cmdline
instead. Although the solution is really simple, it was difficult to Google anything useful thus this post.
Finally found a hint in http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/bash-preserving-whitespace-using-set-and-eval

P.S. If you need to call a Linux shell command using Java – Runtime.exec() method, use an array as the input and DON’T try to wrap every argument in spaces. It works on Windows but not Linux.